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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#301

Post by kermatt »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #296

Once again I appeal: who is shipping code they don't understand? Those who do so are creating the problem, not the coding agent. I use agents all day, every single day. But I also push back, understand what was written, and ensure I read and understand everything I ship. Does it slow me down? Uh, yup. You bet. Yes, this article literally advocates for slowing the fuck down, but it also makes the coding agents out to…

The problem is not the AI users who frequent this board and are shipping code they don't understand. It is the moronic MBA trained executives who can only think about speed, more speed, more revenue for less cost. Quality is an optional expense. A race where the finish line is the current fiscal quarter, to hell with everything after that. The "we can fix it later" Band-Aid over a tumor.

Sensible engineers who look AI as another (potentially powerful) tool in the toolbox "aren't forward looking enough". I watched this happen in real time at my previous company, where every discussion about quality was interpreted as slowing down progress, and the only thing that was looked on favorably was the idea of replacing developers with machines - because they are "cheaper and faster".

The logical minds here on HN are less prone to believing in magic and AI fairies, but they are often not the ones setting the rules. And the number of companies being run by people with critical thinking skills is getting smaller by the day.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#302

Post by andai »

simonw wrote: post #27

Useful context here is that the author wrote Pi, which is the coding agent framework used by OpenClaw and is one of the most popular open source coding agent frameworks generally.

For reference, the creator of OpenClaw has roughly the opposite philosophy:

https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#303

Post by konfusinomicon »

stuffn wrote: post #30
badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

Largely a problem of VCs and shareholders. After my 12th year of "we'll get around to bug fixes" and "this is an emergency" I realize I am absolutely not doing anything related to engineering. My job means less than the moron PM who graduated bottom of their class in . The lack of trust in me despite having almost a life in software is actually so insulting it's hard to quantify. Now I barely look at ticket requireme…

same experience here. trust deficits so rampant i question if ive ever been right once in my career. dont forget the lack of the word 'iterate' in the decision makers vocabulary. and as soon as the word sunset is uttered you know your in for a bumpy ride once again

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#304

Post by kubanczyk »

6510 wrote: post #226

I keep returning to this thought: Assuming our abstraction architecture is missing something fundamental, what is it? My gut says something simple is missing that makes all of the difference. One thought I had was that our problem lives between all the things taking something in and spitting something out. Perhaps 90% of the work writing a "function" should be to formally register it as taking in data type foo 1.54.3…

> My gut says something simple is missing that makes all of the difference.

We have too much code - languages to program machines.

We need a new different language now.

A plan.md, written in what... legalese English? Really? Am I back in 1897? People committing that to vcs, sheesh...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#305

Post by metobehonest »

abletonlive wrote: post #287
metobehonest wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If doomers were good at predicting these events and how it will play out they'd all be rich as hell, but no, they are for the most part a bunch of broke whiners. Oh, the classic "if you're so smart then why aren't you rich" non argument. I'm sure Carl Sagan was a just whiny loser because he didn't figure out how to become a billionaire from knowing how physics works. His prediction that the planet would warm several…

> People who push dangerous neoliberal propaganda like carbon capture or "infinite growth on a finite planet is possible" Good thing we are not confined to a closed system in any practical sense. You act like we haven't already used space for economic growth. It's also a good thing that the concept of "growth" in this context is not limited by physical constraints. You're talking about growth of value, not growth in…

>You actually think the economy has reached the point of maximum growth due to the laws of thermodynamics?

Of course it hasn't. The real problem is that the atmosphere is being poisoned beyond repair, at an increasing pace, and that is tied to economic growth. That will eventually un-terraform the planet into a place hostile to agriculture, be it in 50 or 100 years. We're nowhere near being able to reverse this in any way, and there are no signs of it slowing down.

Are actuaries stupid doomers whose worldviews make them unable to function in society? You decide: https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...

>Good thing we are not confined to a closed system in any practical sense.You act like we haven't already used space for economic growth.

Oh, am I to believe space mining fantasies maybe? I'm sure we'll get there, just after AGI solves nuclear fusion for us in the next 5 years. Then we can have star trek replicators to go with them. I just wish it would happen sooner, that sea floor mining stuff is starting to gain traction and it isn't looking pretty.

>It's also a good thing that the concept of "growth" in this context is not limited by physical constraints

It actually is. The concept of "decoupling" of the economy from material resources has been debunked for a while now. Theoretically there can be efficiency gains that generate further growth, but those are usually quickly cannibalized by increasing demand, plus we're deep on the diminishing returns phase in a lot of fields.

I recommend this resource: https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#306

Post by nhhvhy »

Towaway69 wrote: post #148
PaulHoule wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perrow’s book Normal Accidents postulates that, given advances which could improve safety, people just decide to emphasize throughput, speed, profits, etc. he turned out to be wrong about aviation (got much safer over time) and maritime shipping (there was a perception of a safety crisis in the late 1970s with oil tankers exploding, now you just hear about the odd exceptional event.)

> Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.[1] This is definitely something that is happening with software systems. The question is: is having an AI that is fundamentally undecipherable in its intention to extend these systems a good approach? Or is an approach of slowing down and…

> planes don’t fall from the sky

Boeing would like a word (; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#307

Post by chatmasta »

leonardoe wrote: post #251

Just yesterday I was discussing many of the ideas presented here with a coworker. I had just walked out of a workshop led by $BIGTECHCOMPANY where someone presented the following toy example: A service goes down. He tells the agent to debug it and fix it. The agent pulls some logs from $CLOUDPROVIDER, inspects the logs, produces a fix and then automatically updates a shared document with the postmortem. This got me t…

The gap in your example is that a human had to realize the system is broken so that he could nudge the agent into fixing it. He can fix that gap by updating the agent to recognize when the system breaks. This now becomes the level at which he debugs… did the agent recognize the failure and self-heal, or not?

And at that point, if the autonomous system breaks, realized it’s broken, and fixes itself before you even notice… then do you need to care whether you learn from it? I suppose this could obfuscate some shared root cause that gets worse and worse, but if your system is robust and fault-tolerant _and_ self-heals, then what is there to complain about? Probably plenty, but now you can complain about one higher level of abstraction.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#308

Post by the_snooze »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #296

Once again I appeal: who is shipping code they don't understand? Those who do so are creating the problem, not the coding agent. I use agents all day, every single day. But I also push back, understand what was written, and ensure I read and understand everything I ship. Does it slow me down? Uh, yup. You bet. Yes, this article literally advocates for slowing the fuck down, but it also makes the coding agents out to…

It's a matter of affordances. The path of least resistance with agents is to let it commit whatever it wants. That's a natural outcome of the design and implementation of agents.

Yes, humans are accountable for the ultimate output. But so are the people who design and build these automation tools. As the saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#309

Post by bodash »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

Exactly! I’ve noticed a resounding amount of people are writing the same pieces recently, it’s almost like everyone’s sounding their alarm for the upcoming tsunami. Who’s listening? Here’s my piece: https://humantodo.dev

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#310

Post by antihero »

ryandrake wrote: post #160
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them. It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock pr…

Well that's the thing, AI can mean anyone with an idea can build it, but only the people that own stuff will be able to leverage that to own more stuff.
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